Make the Border Kids Americans

By HUGH HEWITT

July 17, 2014

Hewitt also hosts a nationally syndicated radio talk show from 6 to 9 p.m. EST and is professor of law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law. Hewitt has authored 15 books, including the 2007 New York Times bestseller, A Mormon In The White House.

Approximately 90,000 minors have entered the country in the two years since President Obama, whether out of the best of intentions, cynical political calculation or as another of his serial expressions of incompetence, allowed the idea to take hold abroad that kids who were brought to the country would be allowed to stay. Numbers are swelling rapidly and detention centers are bursting at the seams. Among them are thousands of unaccompanied Central American children—approximately 52,000 since October, according to federal records.

Now, the United States has, in effect, a refugee crisis unlike any it has faced since the Mariel boat-lift exodus from Cuba in 1980, or the mass Vietnamese flight from the communists in the years following the fall of Saigon.

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I have long argued on my radio show that the immigration crisis will continue until a long, strong, double-sided fence extends over every passable mile of the 2,000 that make up the U.S.-Mexican border, but I am not arguing for that now. Right now the country ought to act to end the humanitarian crisis of tens of thousands of what are, in effect, orphans and strangers in our land. The very young among them should find “forever families” right here, right now. They should become Americans. The process is not hard to imagine in broad outline or to implement quickly.

First, if a child under 13 can identify a parent, the child should be re-united with the parent immediately. Disposition of the parent’s status—in all likelihood permanent residence without citizenship if they have been here for years—can await the comprehensive immigration reform bill that will pass either after President Obama leaves office in January 2017, or if a strong Republican majority emerges from the midterms, perhaps next year, provided the bill does genuinely deliver the long, strong double-sided fence (almost certainly a minimum 1,000 miles in length) and the increased border security personnel to patrol it.

If children under 13 cannot identify a parent, they ought to be relocated to a new, centralized, humane federal facility exclusively for young unaccompanied minors, almost certainly at the United States Marine Corps’ Camp Pendleton in California, which handled a vast influx of 50,000 Vietnamese refugees for resettlement in 1975. Many Marines and residents of Orange and San Diego County have memories of organizing and administering that difficult task. It can be done again, and perhaps even more quickly if the Congress will step forward and authorize the churches of America to do what they are built to do: Shelter the orphan. The web would allow an application to be filed quickly, the adoption accomplished expeditiously. But to whom?

If Congress were to authorize adoption by any couple who were (1) certified by a church of (2) at least 250 members and at least five years of existence as a couple of character and standing within the congregation and (3) were under the age of 60, (4) had at least one member of the couple with a full time job of at least five year’s duration and (5) had raised or were presently raising at least one child who had achieved any normal set of measurements, the crisis over the effectively orphaned children would be over within months. Americans from all over the country would step up to care for these children, to give them new “forever families,” a term the Heritage Foundation’s Sarah Torre introduced to me, which captures the goal we should have for these youngest border crossers.